


Demon In My View

by dellaxstreet



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hannibal (TV) Fusion, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Charles Is An Empath, Discussion Of A Lot of Violence, Everything is a bit dark, Except Background Intern Darcy, It's There From The Get-Go, M/M, heed the warnings
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-09-27
Packaged: 2018-10-11 08:32:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,209
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10460463
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dellaxstreet/pseuds/dellaxstreet
Summary: When he arrived to extract Fury's favorite consultant from under twelve dead mobsters, the last thing Erik Lehnsherr expected was for the man to be perfectly unharmed, or for him to claim he'd just tried to convince them to let him go before they all started killing each other. That was the day he knew to keep an eye on Charles Xavier.Fourteen months later, they find themselves chasing a ritualistic serial killer side-by-side, and things are about to get worse long before they get better.





	1. Genesis

The Brennan case was a shitshow from start to finish. What had a civilian consultant even been _doing_ close enough to the investigation that he got himself snatched up by organized crime? And what on earth had possessed anyone to leave things so long that said consultant was in danger as long as he was? These were all essential questions that Erik had rattling around his head when he rolled up to see the crime scene techs pulling body after body out of the place, and felt his stomach drop.

The last thing he, or anyone, for that matter, had been expecting, was for them to get in there and find that among the carnage, which had apparently amounted to a bloodbath, was that the consultant in question was still in one piece. He was where the mobsters had left him, zip-tied to a chair which had tipped over at some point in the ensuing carnage.

There, lying sideways, with a pool of blood reaching its way lazily out toward him, was one Charles Xavier. Perfectly unharmed. Perfectly untouched. Surrounded by the chalk outlines of a dozen dead men.

“All I did was try to talk to them, Agent Lehnsherr,” he managed, in a voice that shook, when there was a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and a cup of hot coffee shoved into his hands. There was an evasion there, something which spoke of stories untold. _Talking, was it?_ “I wanted to convince them to let me go. And they started fighting. The next thing I knew...”

“Please, call me Erik.” He clapped a hand on the other man’s shoulder, thinking that if it had just been conversation then it was _some_ gifted tongue Xavier possessed. “You’re a very lucky man to have made it out unharmed, Charles.”

The smile this garnered was grim. “Lucky. Is that what I am?”

Gifted _and_ insightful. He made a mental note to keep an eye on this one.

 

* * *

 

_**Fourteen Months Later** _

“Charles. _Charles._ ” From the doorway, there came yet another lobbed wad of fabric which could only be a pair of socks. He sat up in bed, groaning, to find Raven standing there with a phone pressed up against her shoulder. “Tell Nick Fury I’m not your fucking PA, would you? And you have to get up. And hire an _actual_ PA, while you’re at it, because apparently there’s another horrific body somewhere and if he starts describing another one to me at six o’clock on Saturday morning before he realizes I’m not you I’m going to throw up _in your bed._ ”

There were several things wrong with that statement, most notably that Nick Fury would ever start giving out the details of a murder investigation without first knowing that it _was_ him on the other end of the line, which meant that he really needed to explain boundaries to whoever was making these phone calls, because it couldn’t actually be Nick. The fact that anyone would mix him and Raven up on the phone was a whole other matter. Maybe Fury had an intern problem.

“What did he say, exactly?” he asked, turning away from the tendrils of his sister’s outstretched annoyance as the sharp flavor of it brushed across his palate, and diving to locate the far-flung socks.

“Something about your serial killer and I did my best not to remember because remember how I can only take on _my_ level of nightmare fuel and not yours too? That was part of this deal. But I wrote down the address, it’s on the fridge. I’m not making you breakfast.” Turning, she strode out.

At least around the apartment, Charles noted, with the curtains drawn, she had no qualms about her true form. It was just a shame that he could feel the way that the blonde shape grated on her when she went back out among the rest of the world, how she fought against the longing and the fear of what might happen if she gave in to that.

“Put pants on! Just because the corpse won’t get up and walk away doesn’t mean that people might not get pissed if you’re late to a crime scene!”

Shaking his head, Charles laughed softly and dressed.

By the time he arrived, he found that a great deal of processing was already under way – and as he made his way up toward the apartment in question, a tech bolted out past him, evidently on his way to empty the contents of his stomach. This was rarely, if ever, a good sign about a crime scene, though it also rarely meant such things bothered him.

The dead were quiet. It was the living who were a riot of noise and color and emotion, screaming at him every moment. The man who had just run past him was a mess of fear and horror and a sickly shade of empathy that could only come from seeing something that he wanted to erase from his mind, and it took Charles a moment to pause, shake that tangle from him and reach out, finding an anchor point. As usual, he found it in the sharp, almost metallic edges of one Agent Erik Lehnsherr’s mind, whose emotions were almost never anything but steady.

Stepping into the room, he could see why the tech had fled. This one was, to use a technical term, a nasty one. The body had been a young man once, perhaps in his mid-thirties, before he had been slit open all along his chest wall and then had its ribs expertly cracked, with a stab wound to the opposite side. The bed the body was nailed to had an old-fashioned wooden headboard, and its wrists were pinioned to it in precisely the way one would position the victim of a crucifixion. Inside the ribcage, the heart had been displayed as though it were the Sacred Heart, surrounded by a crown of rushes.

There was even a plaque nailed above the head, with the requisite four letters: INRI.

The air in the rooms left behind by some killers, particularly the cruelest, most methodical of their kind, left psychic bruises. This, Charles had learned early. The dead were quiet, but their killers screamed, and they left behind a swirling mix of their intent, things he could follow, _feel_ long after they were gone. Sometimes it came to him in his sleep, in ways he couldn’t control, but which could control him. He could reach into places with his gifts which no one else could.

Right now, he looked at this room and he knew one thing for certain: “He’s done this before.”

Erik, stepping neatly up beside him, raised an eyebrow as he turned. “You’ve been here for all of a minute, and yet you sound very certain of that statement, Charles.”

It was in the echoing sadism, the ritualism of the motions, the complete lack of remorse. The way in which he was almost certain that no one would find any forensic evidence. The fact that the message, for some reason, seemed to be _I am God. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair._ His throat worked. “No one simply arrives at a first murder which is this criminally sophisticated, Erik. It would be like a first grader reading _War and Peace._ ”

He could see the grimace pass over the other man’s features, as Erik acknowledged the point he was making. “This is the second one like it. We didn’t want to call you in if the first one was some kind of fluke, but… like you said. Nobody wakes up and starts killing people this way one day.”

For a moment, Charles was almost afraid to ask. “What was the first murder?”

“The Pieta. Which puts our body count at three… and makes this possibly serial.” Turning, Erik wrapped an arm loosely around his shoulders and steered him away from the bed so that they could speak quietly. “We work well enough together, and frankly, I’ve noticed that things tend to go much more smoothly for Fury when he has you on board a case than when he doesn’t. What do you say?”

Something about this felt wrong. Not wrong in the sense of Erik’s offer, but wrong in the sense of deep in the pit of Charles’s stomach, a churning blackness which rose up and wanted to choke him. A sense that if he went down this path, the case might eat him alive and never spit him back out. The Brennan case had nearly done that, and now Erik offered another which could do the same.

He drew in a shaky breath. Could he afford to risk himself, his sanity, the chance of his own exposure, for the sake of solving this? Could he afford to risk letting someone else die?

“If I help you, I do it on my terms,” he said, as firmly as he could.

“Relax. We don’t _all_ jump when Nick says jump.”

 

* * *

 

_A little boy screams, but no matter how he screams, he can’t make it out of the way in time. Nothing can stop this, nothing can ever stop this, the path of this onslaught… it’s coming and he can’t stop it… the monster in the darkness… a gunshot twisting… sunlight unfolding and oh God no not that the radiance is spreading…_

… _.brighter than a thousand suns…_

_...the shell casing falls…_

_...all is well._


	2. Chronicles

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “When he woke up screaming this morning, he was speaking German. I didn’t catch it, but Charles might remember. It’s all part of his process – it might mean your killer likes imported socks, or prostitutes, or something, hell if I know. Anyway. Ask him if he remembers what he was saying.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapters will probably get longer as I go! Also this one wouldn't leave me alone so, super quick update.

Gathering the Pierce files under one arm the next morning, Erik departed for the home of one Charles Xavier. Whatever had happened in the man’s life to lead him away from the upbringing that had deposited that posh accent in the edges of his voice, it hadn’t put such a dent in his finances, the agent noted, that he couldn’t afford a place like this. While it was on the smaller side, the house reeked of the kind of quiet restraint one paid for.

The person who greeted him at the door was not, however, Charles. Instead, he found himself faced with the disgruntled-looking face of woman whom he’d seen in passing before, slender, blonde, and with an air of quiet menace in the tip of her chin that said she was not to be fucked with. _Raven,_ Erik’s mind supplied. The sister.

“I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” she told him, arms folded firmly across her chest. “Is this case worth it?”

His eyebrows rose. “I’d suggest you have this conversation with Nick Fury, if I didn’t then have to wonder how he’d _fare_ in that conversation. What happened?”

Raven glared at him. “He woke up screaming this morning. It’s been one day, _one day_ , since you all dragged him back into another case and he woke up screaming! So I hope you’re really pleased with yourself! Give yourselves a pat on the back, boys, you’re already chipping away at my brother’s sanity and if you think you’re getting into this house with more things to give him nightmares, you can think again.”

Erik had to admire her. Partly because, despite the fact that he knew nearly everything in her home could be used against her in a fight, he still wasn’t entirely certain it would be a one-sided fight. Something about the determination which had gone taut in every line of Raven’s body said that she would fight down to the last to protect her brother, and he could respect that quality in a person.

But he still had a job to do, whether he respected her desire to protect Charles from further potential harm or not. And more to the point, Charles still had a job to do whether his sister took umbrage to the things that his work did to him or not. It was really not up to her to decide.

“We both have a serial killer to catch, Miss Xavier, and it’s not up to you whether or not he wants to. He’s the one who agreed to. I asked, he answered. On his terms.” Erik didn’t bother to couch his answer with false politeness or charm, not when what mattered was looking her in the eye and telling her that it had been Charles’s decision, and not some attempt by the bureau to strong-arm him into going places he didn’t want to go, as had evidently been the case other times. He suddenly found his fondness for Nick Fury’s managerial style dropping precipitously.

A long moment passed between them, gray eyes locked on blue, before finally Raven nodded sharply and stepped aside to let him pass. “If you let him get hurt, Lehnsherr,” she told him, cool menace in her voice, “you deal with me.”

“I don’t doubt that for a second.”

Following the direction she was nodding in, Erik made his way back toward what he could only assume was only some kind of study. He had nearly reached it when Raven’s voice called after him, adding a question: “You don’t speak German, by any chance, do you?”

The question was so odd that he had to stop in his tracks and turn to blink at her as she followed him, repeating, “You don’t speak German, by any chance, do you?”

“As a matter of fact, I do. Why?”

“When he woke up screaming this morning, he was speaking German. I didn’t catch it, but Charles might remember. It’s all part of his process – it might mean your killer likes imported socks, or prostitutes, or something, hell if I know. Anyway. Ask him if he remembers what he was saying.” Waving a hand at him, Raven stepped back, though Erik got the sense that she was going to watch him until he turned the handle on the study door and walked inside.

‘It’s all part of his process’ had been the standard excuse for the many odd things Charles Xavier did on cases for years, to hear agency gossip tell it. He sleepwalked, had strange night terrors and fits, sometimes hallucinated if you watched him closely enough, all of it relating back to the central tenet of an uncanny ability to see inside killers’ heads. Most believed that he simply got psychologically close enough to them that he made himself sick with it, had a sensitive mind that cracked under the pressure. Erik, who’d now had a little over a year to observe him more closely, was not at all sure this was the truth.

It looked a lot less like Charles studied them to the point of exhaustion, and a lot more like he was simply uncanny. As Erik was, as others were or might be. Not, of course, that he had any proof to the contrary – and he had been very careful not to reveal himself, in case he was wrong.

Inside the study, Charles was propped up at an enormous oak desk with what looked like a dozen case files and a cup of tea, along with a second one set precariously at his elbow. Adding the files under his arm to the corner of the desk, Erik walked to snatch up the cup of tea in danger of going all over what the consultant was working on before it toppled over, apparently startling him from a train of thought.

“Oh! Erik. I didn’t hear you come in.” Rubbing at his eyes with the heel of one hand, Charles sat back and offered a bleary smile. “I see you got past the dragon at the gate after all.”

“That I did.” Turning, Erik eyed the files spread out over the desktop and winced at the crime scene photos that went with them. Several grouped together in one pile depicted a trio of apparent crucifixions in the Midwest, each in a different state so that the connection might never have been made, each left in the middle of a cornfield with the chest cavity cracked open and flowers spilling from where the heart ought to have been.

Flipping through the medical examiner’s reports, his brows knit. There had been no hearts found at the scene.

“When you said yesterday that no one wakes up one morning and starts killing people like this one day, it got me thinking. We ought to be looking for crimes with some of the elements, but not all of them. So if we consider yesterday’s crime an evolution… then these three fit the pattern.” Charles’s face was grim, but etched with the same determination that had been written across his sister’s earlier.

“I had Nick send over anything which might fit either crime, but since I hadn’t seen the files on the first murder, I couldn’t be sure what I was looking at – do you mind?” He held out his hand for the Pierce files, which Erik handed to him. To his credit, he didn’t flinch opening it.

Erik had seen men with iron stomachs need a minute on that particular crime scene. It had been like something out of a nightmare when they’d found it. A woman encased in lacquer like a doll, like some kind of horrific living marble statue, who had by all accounts had the stuff poured down her throat, dressed and posed, accompanied by a man with crucifixion wounds, stabbed through the heart was laid and draped across her lap.

“I’d need to see the crime scene to be sure but… she was alive when this was done?” His voice was soft, turning pages. “Like the poor fellow yesterday who experienced vivisection. And all of the prior victims.”

Erik wondered if Charles was aware that he did that. Framed his insights in terms of such certainty. Or rather, he wondered if anyone else would have caught it, would even have questioned the bedrock of his faith. Possibly not, not when he was deep in his own thoughts like he was now.

“Unfortunately, we believe so, yes.”

“Then this is as much about the sadism as it is about the presentation. It’s not just the ritual and the audience, it’s inflicting as much pain on whoever this person is killing as possible before they’re dead. But is it about the religion, or is it about the art? Is he trying to recreate one particular piece with these crucifixions? I wish I knew. So far all we know is that he likes Michelangelo.” Charles winced.

Erik shook his head. “That’s still a lot more than we knew yesterday.” He’d seen it before, on other cases, but never more so than now. Charles made leaps which others didn’t without pausing to hesitate in the darkness. Sometimes that could be to his detriment, when the dark made a meal of him, which was clearly what Raven was so worried about, but it was also precisely what made him such an asset.

Then he remembered. “Oh, your sister told me to ask you,” he added, watching Charles reach for the cup of tea which seemed least likely to have gone cold, “what it was you woke up saying this morning. Since I speak German.”

Wide, blue eyes blinked at him in surprise for a moment, and then the consultant set his cup of tea down. “Oh, that. Well, I’m sure it will sound quite insane to someone who’s outside of my head, but it was just a dream – I’m not sure I could explain it very well at all – I’m not at all sure where it came from – it was nothing.”

“If it’s something that could help, you can tell me anything, Charles. No matter how strange you might think it sounds.”

Erik thought he saw the consultant’s throat work for a moment, as though he were trying to decide whether or not to tell him. Then he seemed to arrive at some sort of decision, because he offered a blinding smile and clasped his hands together. “Very well. There was more of it, I think? But what I woke up saying was _Alles ist gut_ , for some reason. Just that. Over and over.”

The world narrowed, very suddenly, down to a sharp point, as Erik stared at Charles. Those words rang in his mind, echoing off old memory, back to days he could not and would not touch, things fenced in with fifty-foot-high walls and encircled with bitter, unceasing winds.

“Erik? Erik, are you all right?”

At the edge of the desk, a teacup jolted off its edge by the sudden motion of an elbow and toppled to the floor, shattering suddenly. Both the room’s occupants jumped, and Erik sat forward suddenly, leaning across the desk as he studied Charles intently for a long moment, stretching out a hand.

Gently, his fallen teaspoon soared, to settle with a clatter back on the desk’s surface.

“I’d say we have a lot to talk about, don’t you?”


	3. Revelations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _No, stay out_ , he thought, though he knew the other man couldn’t hear him. _Keep this darkness from your thoughts, before it spreads and puts down roots._ No matter how many killers he chased or cases he closed, there was always the knowledge that a greater evil lived, and Erik would spare others the knowledge of it if he could. Some monsters should not be brought into focus, instead left so formless that they could be shaken off like fog. Otherwise… there was no telling what might happen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this took forever and a day to update which I'm truly sorry for. It's a long and sordid tale of losing the desire to continue and finding it again, but I've tried to make up for that with a longer one this time!

A long and palpably tense silence followed Erik’s statement. Charles studied him with the measured gaze of a man who was assessing something very specific, perhaps looking for something in the other man’s face. As the moment stretched out further, his gaze flicked from the broken teacup on the floor to the teaspoon now resting atop his desk.

Head cocking slightly to one side, in what was almost reminiscent of a confused dog, he exhaled a sigh. “Please don’t take this the wrong way, Erik, but am I awake at the moment?”

Clearly, Charles was considering the possibility that this was either a dream or a hallucination. _And this is not the first time he’s had trouble telling the difference,_ the thought followed. Whatever and however it was that the man could fit his mind into a thousand other points of view as easily as breathing, until the things he concluded defied investigative technique itself, it probably often involved tap-dancing on the edge.

But surely he couldn’t be anywhere near the kind of edge which Erik could feel howling after him. The abyss of the past was behind him, and it had _nothing_ to do with this case. He had no interest in digging up that particular demon, not now and not ever. Which meant, what, that the man he worked with was seeing into him, rather than their killer?

There was no way on Earth that Charles Xavier could have pulled those words out of the darkness. Not unless he had plucked them from the depths of old nightmares.

Raising his hand again, Erik set the teaspoon rising up above the desktop, where it turned slow circles in the air. “If this were a dream, don’t you think things would be better or worse than a little spilled tea and broken china? I promise, you’re awake.” Before the other man could flinch away, the spoon was zooming towards his forehead, where it impacted softly and bounced off.

Charles’s jaw worked, as though he were struggling with something a moment. Then his expression broke out into a much warmer thing, lit up with quiet wonder and disbelief. “I do believe you’ve been holding out on me, Agent Lehnsherr.”

Erik raised a single eyebrow in response.

Hands fluttering a moment, as though he couldn’t quite decide what to do with them, the consultant reached out to take hold of one of his hands, turning it over as though this would explain it. “I knew you were different, of course I knew, but not quite in so many words…” Charles paused, as if reconsidering his words. “It’s very difficult to explain the inside of my own head sometimes. Language fails, as do every one of my senses. Not, mind you, that my senses ever pay this any mind.”

His words came out almost breathless. The transformation was subtle, but noticeable – from a body tensed like a spring coiled far too tightly to something looser, a posture which suggested he was no longer trying so desperately to keep himself in check.

“Most of the Bureau either think you’re crazy, or a fantastic trainwreck of a workaholic who’s edging that way.” Erik felt his mouth quirking into a smile despite himself, the strange joy of it infectious. Hiding grated on him, in more ways than he could possibly count, and now here he was, sitting across from a man who understood. “I always thought I could see glimpses of it, when your armor cracked. But I had to be sure. Until you, I thought I was alone.”

“Oh, my friend.” Charles’s eyes danced. “If you were the only one, the world would be _very_ boring.”

Laughing softly, Erik glanced down at his hands and blinked, retracting his palm. “How did you know?” Quietly, he wondered what telltale signs there might be.

“Other people’s minds are chaos, most of the time. They can’t help it. But yours has always been like a clear note in the midst of all that. Everyone else shouts… you resonate. A bit like a hammer on steel.” He sat back in his seat, expression half-thoughtful. “I can’t really fit words, or senses, to the things I feel. Imagine you spent all your time seeing sounds and tasting color, and you might start to understand, but even that falls short. No mind has places to send that kind of input. You can’t tell your mind what these things consist of, so it invents the rest. Or so goes my theory.”

The image of one’s mind as a place which would take all of the wild things it couldn’t understand and simply find corners of perception to tuck it into until they filtered past did sound like it might explain some of the Charles-related urban legends which had been told by colleagues over the years. “Is it thoughts you hear, or emotions?”

“Emotions, for the most part. The rest is complicated.” Charles shrugged one shoulder, slow and casual, yet somehow Erik got the impression that this was a door best left alone. The controlled quality of his movements had trickled back for a moment, even as the empath did his best to display the exact opposite. “What about you, is it all objects or just metal ones? How far does that extend? I’ve always wondered if I’d meet someone who could pull things apart at the atom.”

And there, back as though it hadn’t left, was the sudden, boyish curiosity. Erik shook his head amusedly. “Only metal, and it extends much further than most people would be remotely comfortable with. I try not to experiment with atom-splitting, on the off chance I level a city.”

It was delivered lightly, so that it could be taken as a joke, and yet Charles leaned forward slightly, gaze intensifying. “Well, we wouldn’t want that, now would we?” There was not the slightest hesitation in him at the implication that Erik could, if he set his mind to it, level a city.

What else could Charles do, he wondered, if he set his mind to it? Suddenly, the memory of pulling the consultant unharmed from a pool of blood while ten other men lay dead around him, apparent victims of a decision to turn on one another, seemed entirely relevant. The Brennan case had been an absolute shitshow, of course, not least of all the investigation that resulted from Charles’s miraculous escape, but Erik remembered the shuttered look in his eyes that night.

Charles Xavier, it seemed, was a man who looked with wonder on the destructive potential locked tight beneath his skin, all the while holding himself tight with tension strung through like wire. He seemed so mild-mannered in the light of day, blue eyes wide and hands already reaching for another one of his many discarded cups of tea. If not for the work they both faced, Erik might have mistaken the consultant for an absent-minded academic, complete with the tweed jacket which wrapped his smaller frame. But when pushed, he could and would kill ten men without hesitating, and without laying a hand on them.

Silent awe settled on him as he studied the man across from him, no doubt drifting into the companionable silence which had fallen over them.

Inevitably, however, that silence stretched and broke as Charles refocused his gaze, making a face at the cold tea before setting it back down again. “You never did finish translating that bit of German for me, Agent Lehnsherr. Judging by your reaction to it, I’d say that it means something.”

The sudden formality would have been jarring, had he not seen it for the gesture it was. An attempt to offer some distance from one another, to give him an additional degree of separation, was unnecessary, but it did speak to the other man’s perceptiveness. Could he hear the unease roiling under Erik’s skin at the mere thought of those words, and all they entailed? At the memories of blood and steel and pain, from so long ago? What was it like, to feel primordial dread secondhand?

Swallowing, he said, almost haltingly slow, “All is well. The phrase means ‘all is well’. It loses something in translation.”

The speculative glance that Charles gave him made him feel, for a moment, like an insect pinned to a board. It felt oddly naked, to be looked at like that, as though it were impossible to hide.

_No, stay out,_ he thought, though he knew the other man couldn’t hear him. _Keep this darkness from your thoughts, before it spreads and puts down roots._ No matter how many killers he chased or cases he closed, there was always the knowledge that a greater evil lived, and Erik would spare others the knowledge of it if he could. Some monsters should not be brought into focus, instead left so formless that they could be shaken off like fog. Otherwise… there was no telling what might happen.

“As I said, it was just a dream. It may mean nothing yet.” And just like that, the false cheer was back, lighting Charles’s expression as he offered a broad smile and got to his feet. “If you’re willing, I’d like to take a look at the first crime scene?”

Nodding quickly, Erik watched him pad from the room, calling over his shoulder that he’d better comb his hair if they were going out in public, and shook his head. Somehow, he doubted this was the last he was going to hear of the nightmare, though if it meant anything at all about their case – well. Things had just gotten _much_ worse.

 

* * *

 

On the face of it, there was nothing terrifying about the words “all is well”. Charles knew this, as surely as he knew that Raven liked to rearrange his sock drawer because she thought his organizational system was absurd. It was all about context, and that context, it would seem, was enough to send Erik’s mind spiraling into dark places full of old pain and the sharp copper tang of old anger. Fresh rage was like being caught in a thunderstorm, but this was a thing of rust and distance, overshadowed by such fear and dread that they seemed to drain the color from the world around him.

Frankly, he’d been impressed that the agent was capable of sitting upright and holding a conversation, with the specter of whatever it was that hung over him looming large between them. But then, Erik Lehnsherr seemed to be a man with a spine made of iron, and not even this could make him bow.

He wasn’t fool enough to believe that the nightmare was truly unrelated, either, not when it evoked such a visceral reaction from the man he’d been partnered with. But some ghosts couldn’t simply be conjured at will, especially not when their keeper clearly had every intention of refusing to address them. He could wait, until the time was right. Forcing the issue, when there might still be other leads to follow, would help no one and nothing.

Changing out of the clothing he realized, belatedly, he’d been wearing since yesterday and dragging a comb through his hair, Charles re-emerged, though he continued to puzzle over what it could be that bothered Erik so much about those three little words. Had he somehow tapped into the other man’s psyche, and shared one of _his_ nightmares? It would be the first time he’d done more than pick up the tenor of someone else’s dreams, but it was hardly impossible. Worse, did it mean that one of Erik’s own nightmares related to this case?

The possibility that Erik might have some connection to a wanton killer, particularly one full of such overwhelming hubris and disdain for humanity, was an uncomfortable thought. Glancing up from the window to study the other man as they drove, Charles’s brow furrowed. No, if he had any connection here, it was in the ugliest of old wounds.

It wasn’t until he’d exited the car and walked a great distance, before finally coming to a stop, that Charles realized he had not said a single word. Nor had he been given any direction that this was the crime scene, but he could feel it, in the way the air shuddered around him, echoing horror back at him.

This time, he shut his eyes, letting it sink in. Arrogance, anger, disgust, such intense focus he almost stumbled a few steps, such need, and underlying that, pain written like heat lightning…

_The others weren’t enough, why aren’t they enough? You could practically howl your frustration. This one has to be perfect, and the next one after it too, or he won’t come. Even gods can be insects, and you are no different. You’ll paralyze them, pin them like insects so they can’t get away, and then they will be your monument. This is your altar, and without a sacrifice, without the blood, these cattle, it means nothing._

_There are screams dying in their throats when you pour the resin down, turning every inch of them into art…_

“Charles? Charles!”

When he’d sunk to the ground, Charles didn’t know, only that he was kneeling now, hands fisted against the imagined blaze. He’d felt it, in every nerve and sinew in his body, for a moment. As he opened his eyes he found them damp, looking up to find Erik’s hand laid on his shoulders. Oh. He’d been shaking him, then.

None of the words bubbling up in his throat were really very helpful. _I just felt them die_ warred with _do you suppose the FBI issues cyanide pills for those circumstances?_ and finally, what won was, “He’s trying to get someone’s attention. All of this, the showy displays, the imagery, it’s not just about proclaiming himself to be superior. He feels he is, yes, but there’s someone else… someone who’s god to a god. This was – blood sacrifice.”

Throat working around sudden hoarseness, Charles wondered if he’d been screaming too, before he’d hit the ground. There was no point asking, not with the thoughtful expression on Erik’s face. Concern receded from his mood like a soft whisper, replaced by his usual steely calm. Behind those stormy eyes, he was turning something over, but he apparently saw no need to let his concern become overbearing. After a moment, he did offer a hand up.

“You do know that will be difficult to sell to the Bureau, when there hasn’t been any sign of a partner in these killings.” But he was not, unlike many others, arguing over the intuitive leap involved. “We’ll need evidence, or else...”

Charles raised his eyebrows. “Or else I’m just a man screaming in the middle of a field?”

Erik let out a quiet snort. “I assure you, you were very dignified.” But something about the way the corners of his mouth twitched, humor rippling through the air around him, said he had a secondary opinion, and it ran entirely counter to the one he’d just stated.

Letting out a mock-indignant huff, Charles brushed himself off. Actually finding evidence would be difficult, at least until the supposed second party in this scenario decided to make themselves known. Chasing one ghost was more than enough work, without considering the possibility that they were after a master and an apprentice – and that the one they’d encountered thus far was only the apprentice. If there were someone else, even more criminally sophisticated and vicious, and if they hadn’t come up in a search of the United States…

Their eyes met at the same moment, confirmation they’d both just had an identical thought. “We ought to be checking Interpol, if he hasn’t shown his face here, don’t you think?”

Erik nodded, digging his phone out of a jacket pocket, even as he jerked his head back in the direction of the car. While Charles listened, he instructed the agent on the other end to begin a search of international databases for similar crimes, or even murders that stood out in much the same way these did thus far.

Something in the creeping sensation that had attached itself to the back of Charles’s mind said that, despite all appearances to the contrary, they wouldn’t have long to wait. Whoever or whatever it was that their killer pledged his allegiance to could hardly overlook these displays forever, and the thought of what shape that response might take was more than enough to send a shudder twisting up his spine.


End file.
